Mediatic attention has a significant impact on the politics of
climate change (see Maxwell Boykoff’s work, for example). In this post,
I use the New York Times’ API to assess how it has covered climate
change over the past few decades.
The dataset for the analysis is the subset of NYT articles from
1995-2022 that included climate change terms in their abstract*.
I look at: * the frequency of climate change articles over time, by
desk and by published page to get a sense of how the salience of climate
change coverage has evolved over time * word use in the abstracts *
climate change and natural disasters
For more detail about the code used to compile the dataset, take a
look at the github version of this document.
A larger share of coverage, a new desk, moving up the pages
This section highlights the increasing coverage dedicated to climate
change over the period through various indicators.**
Frequency overall, over time
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'

We can see that, as a share of all articles published each month,
climate change articles have become a larger share in recent years. As
will be visible in future charts, the 2005-2010 saw an increase in
coverage before stagnation in the early 2010s. It’s only since 2015 that
the share of articles discussing climate change has regularly been above
the 0.5% threshold.
In the chart above, it’s also clear that there seems to be some kind
of seasonal pattern to the publishing.

From these charts we can see that generally there tend to be more
articles published toward the end of the year, and in June.
Frequency by desk
In the next section, we look to see how coverage has shifted between
desks.
The following table highlights the variation in aggregated NYT desks
(I aggregated desk codes that likely reflect historical shifts in naming
(e.g. Business vs. Business Desk), and put all desks with fewer than 100
articles into their own “other” category). The National, Foreign and
Editorial desks have a significant share of articles, reflecting their
historic dominance and significant size. A significant number are either
unclassified or in smaller desks.
##
## Books Business Climate Culture Editorial Foreign Letters Metro.
## 111 406 449 136 571 585 107 243
## National None OpEd Other Science
## 584 867 394 694 293

These charts provide a significant amount of information.
Some basic notes:
The charts highlights the creation of the new climate desk at the
NYT in 2017url,
with about 450 articles written by that desk since, nearly 10% of the
total number of articles in our sample. It also highlights the
seeming creation of new tags for letters and op-eds mid-way through the
sample. Beyond that, looking at the data, we can see a concentration
of articles in the book section around 2005-2007 (the era of Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth), and over the past three years. There are a
perhaps surprisingly large (and continuous) number of articles from the
Business desk, also peaking around 2006-2007. Looking at the
different geographic desks, it is striking that the flow is more or less
constant for the Foreign desk, has larger peaks in 2009 and 2016 for the
National desk, and is definitely focused around 2006 for the
Metropolitan desk.
Frequency by Page Number
Next, we turn to the page numbers – which gives a sense to the
relative importance accorded to climate change as a topic on any single
day.
## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'

There generally seems to be a relatively constant page rank for
articles about climate change – but it seems likely that earlier years
are influenced by having relatively few articles. There does seem to be
a downward trend “towards the front” in the past decade.
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'

One way around the issues with the previous chart is to just focus on
front page stories (aka print page 1). Indeed, over the past five years,
there has been an increase in the number of more front page stories
about climate change. The peaks of front page coverage were in May 2006
(an Inconvenient Truth was released on May 24) and October of 2021.
Presidents and Scientists, Nation and World
We’ll now use quanteda to dig a little deeper into what words
are used in the abstracts.


These exercises to determine the frequency of words used in articles
reveal some key insights. For one thing, political leaders
stand out – “Presid”, but also specifically Bush and Obama. Other actors
that are key to these debates, and to press discussion, are
scientists, mentioned nearly 500 times. Perhaps ironically in
the context of global collective action debates, “nation” and
“world” are #11 and #12 in frequency, respectively. As a last note
– it is perhaps not surprising to see how much money (“$”) gets
mentioned in these articles.
Natural disasters
Finally, the rest of this project will be focused on looking at how
natural disasters drive coverage of climate policy, using a dictionary
for natural disasters to sort through our existing corpus of
articles.

Indeed, while the number of climate change articles has been
increasing generally, it is also seems like there are more articles
specifically referencing natural disasters as part of the coverage.
Natural disasters and climate change in the NYT
For this next and final section, I go to wikipedia to gather some
data on the impact of these natural disasters that are mentioned in
articles referencing climate change. By hand, I went through and skimmed
the selected abstracts for references, and then found the relevant
wikipedia page url. There are not English wikipedia pages for all
disasters.
As discussed, the NYT is increasingly touching upon specific natural
disasters in its climate change coverage. Many of the disasters
mentioned were devastating in terms of human and economic costs.
It’s worth noting that most of this coverage remains of US and
Western European disasters – despite our understanding that these places
will not necessarily face the biggest challenges. And indeed, looking at
word counts, it is striking that articles above 1,000 words are focused
on natural disasters in the West.
NB: The climate change terms used in the initial analysis are:
“climate change” “global warming” “greenhouse effect” “climate
catastrophe” “climate emergency” “climate crisis” and “global heating.”
In this section, I build a corpus of NYT article from 1995 to 2022 that
include terms of climate change. To select these terms, I drew from some
established work (see
Lineman et al, or Kumar
and Li).